Frustrated by a lack of informed and honest review websites covering a wide range of electronic music, I write them myself.

Thursday, June 23, 2016

Coldcut - Tone Tales From Tomorrow Too

Ntone: 1996

This is one damn weird CD. For sure you can glean that just from the cover art, a bizarre bit of ‘90s CGI that looks like something out of a SNES fever dream. But did you know this is a Coldcut DJ mix? Seeing as how More and Black don’t often dip their fingers into the realms of mix CDs, you’d think Tone Tales From Tomorrow Too would get more attention. Heck, this came out just a year after 70 Minutes Of Madness, a set many hail as one of the finest mixes committed to disc of the ‘90s. Their mighty successful album Let Us Play! was also just around the calendar corner. For all intents this little CD was on the market at peak Coldcut prominence, so shouldn’t it be talked up just as much? Yeah, maybe if it’d been marketed through Ninja Tune, that might have been the case. Rather, Tone Tales From Tomorrow Too was a showcase of sub-label Ntone, in fact the second of a short-lived promotional series. Because the “Too” is supposed to be “Two”, get it? Hell, if you think the title’s strained alliteration is something else, you should read the inlay blurb.

Naturally, I knew none of this going in. Tone Tales From Tomorrow Too was one of my earliest ‘underground’ purchases, joined with the knowledge drop of Techno Nights – Ambient Dawn and taste-changing One A.D. Thus I had no clue who Coldcut was, much less any of the other names on the tracklist. My only requisite for a buy was cool-strange cover art (check!), and a ton of unknowns I could discover. Names like Neoptropic, Hex, Transcend, Spacetime Continuum, and Alien Community certainly fit the bill, all with abstract future-sounding song titles like 50cc, 2003, Dubmunculus, and Alien Community. Why, this must be one of those Very Important Albums in my musical journey then! Maybe, if it wasn’t such an odd collection of tunes.

Ntone was essentially Ninja Tune’s outlet for leftfield music: druggy trip-hop, dubby techno, and dreamy stoner ambient, which Tone Tales From Tomorrow Too delivers in full force. It was all a bit much to take in for Teenage Sykonee, a larger leap into the underground than he was ready for. It didn’t help matters that the entire mix is a single index, so if I wanted to hear more of that wicked-awesome sci-fi electro of Alien Community or Spacetime Continuum’s Pressure, I had to play out most of the CD to get there. Heck, for the longest time I thought these were the same track, though the stylistic similarities make sense given Jonah Sharp is behind both aliases (Alien Community was a pairing with Pete Namlook).

Why would Coldcut do such a thing? Their mix isn’t filled with lengthy layered blends, most tracks transitioned as per normal for a chill set. It’s because of that CD-ROM app, isn’t it; the clunky turntable mixer with samples from various tracks? Aww, I thought the extra media was gonna’ be trippy CGI videos.